We present three studies in mobile learning. First, we polled 333 Japanese university students regarding their use of mobile devices. One hundred percent reported owning a mobile phone. Ninety-nine percent send e-mail on their mobile phones, exchanging some 200 e-mail messages each week. Sixty-six percent e-mail peers about classes; 44% e-mail for studying. In contrast, only 43% e-mail on PCs, exchanging an average of only two messages per week. Only 20% had used a personal digital assistant. Second, we e-mailed 100-word English vocabulary lessons at timed intervals to the mobile phones of 44 Japanese university students, hoping to promote regular study. Compared with students urged to regularly study identical materials on paper or Web, students receiving mobile e-mail learned more (Po0.05). Seventy-one percent of the subjects preferred receiving these lessons on mobile phones rather than PCs. Ninety-three percent felt this a valuable teaching method. Third, we created a Web site explaining English idioms. Student-produced animation shows each idiom's literal meaning; a video shows the idiomatic meaning. Textual materials include an explanation, script, and quiz. Thirty-one Japanese college sophomores evaluated the site using video-capable mobile phones, finding few technical difficulties, and rating highly its educational effectiveness.

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While existing scholarship focuses attention on the impact of state control and repression on Chinese civil society, the increasingly independent role of the Communist Party has been largely overlooked. This article reviews the Party's drive to “comprehensively cover” grassroots society over the previous decade against the theoretical debate unfolding among Chinese scholars and Party theoreticians regarding the Party's role with respect to civil society. Focusing on greater Shanghai, frequently cited as a national model of Party-building, I describe the Party's advance and the emergence of Party-organized non-governmental organizations (PONGOs), a new hybrid form of social organization sponsored and supported by local Party committees. I argue that these developments invite a reconsideration of our understandings of the ongoing “associational revolution” and of the Party's relationship to China's flourishing “third realm.”

Social movement theorists have posited that it is not simply the existence of grievances but the manner in which they are interpreted and transmitted that contributes to the mobilization of dissent. Research conducted largely in liberal Western polities suggests that successful social movement "frames" clearly define problems, assign blame to a specific agent and suggest courses for remedial action. Yet dissenters in repressive authoritarian or totalitarian regimes face very different risks and political opportunity structures. Two popular contentious practices in contemporary China -ironic or ambiguous doorway hangings, and the body cultivation techniques of the recently outlawed sectarian group falun gong -demonstrate that ironic, ambiguous or metonymic frames represent adaptive strategies for the articulation of dissenting views in the face of repressive state power.

We introduce m-learning -learning with mobile devices, such as cell phones and pocket computers. We review the hardware and research on m-learning, and discuss our future work with mobile foreign-language study.